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Meanwhile, Read This Case Study to Discover How One Goliath Negotiation Course Exercise Saved a $652,000 Amazon Contract
Always be respectful of client wishes. Words to live by. That is why I’ve respectfully kept this case study anonymous and you’ll see why in a minute. It would have been better with a name and face to it like all my other testimonials, but my word, it’s such a remarkable turnaround I had to tell it here.
My client had just started working one to one with me. It was just after his first session. He loved one of the preparation exercises for a negotiation so much he decided to introduce it into their annual planning meeting with his operational team.
It’s based around a little creativity exercise that studies have shown leads to 30%-35% more insights than standard risk planning.
It’s a small but rapidly growing firm. They’d just tripled their office space the year before and had doubled their staff and contractor numbers. Business was very healthy.
But this was their biggest single contract yet. By a long way! Yet it was only an introductory contract, a tester. If they delivered this well, it was highly likely to lead to much bigger things.
Using this method, it was the most junior person at the table that spotted it.
The revelation was delivered respectfully, even apologetically. The junior presumed it had probably been spotted and amended before, or that they themselves must have misunderstood something.
Mixed reactions in the room. At first a few didn’t quite grasp what the junior was saying. Then as it all started to clarify in their heads, some went to denial, ‘ah that would never happen’. Others closer to panic, ‘oh my god if that happens we’re totally screwed’. Others felt the rush of a bullet dodged and then my client went to calmer acceptance, “ok, this is shocking but we’ve spotted this now. We can do something about it and protect ourselves before it blows up in our face. We can dig ourselves out of this hole! How do we best do that???”
They discussed and debated different solutions, quickly whittling them down and making a decision. Disaster was avoided. The most lucrative contract was saved from a client who they would have to scale up again for.
They were just doing their business as usual. Just like any of us running a business.
If they’d conducted the planning meeting as usual they would have missed this glaring weakness. It was all too human not to see it. Something that exposed them to an extremely messy and disastrous situation should they be called on it.
If he’d been my client just a few weeks earlier, it would have been captured at the planning stages of the negotiation. Not weeks later in a strategy planning meeting. But late was most definitely better than never.
With my clients we cover different methods to uncover both the traps and the opportunities.
That one simple little exercise to see things just slightly differently saved a contract worth over $652,000… and counting.
If you want to expand your abilities to see opportunities and dangers and unlock more value potential in every deal then why not apply for a complimentary negotiation strategy call?
You’ll get clear on some of the main blockers or traps currently inhibiting your results and the opportunities that exist in your negotiations.